• 2 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not familiar with how piefed handles it specifically but aren’t posts/comments self-upvoted by default?

    You could probably figure it out pretty easily just by looking at a user’s posts, no?

    (This is unless piefed makes it so the main actor up votes their own posts, and the anonymous actor upvotes others’ posts, but then it would still be possible to do analysis on others’ comments to get a pretty accurate guess)








  • I’m a CS student and Linux was great for all of the programming classes. For any classes that were more writing focused you can still use the online versions of MS office/Google drive. I’m assuming there aren’t any programs you’ll need specific to psychology but that is sometimes a problem with some STEM majors like engineering

    The one problem that kept me dual-booting on my laptop was OneNote. I like taking notes using a pen for some classes (and my laptop has pen support) and nothing I tried on Linux even comes close in my experience. I tried obsidian + excalidraw plugin, along with xournalpp, but nothing came close for the way I take notes.




  • It’s naive to think that someone is at fault for falling prey to the psychological tactics publishers use to push people toward micro transactions.

    If you think about it, it’s really not that different from saying people with gambling addictions deserve to be broke. Microtransactions might seem like an obvious scam to a lot of people, but a lot of people fall it and waiving it away and saying they deserve it will only make the problem worse.



  • Couldn’t aimbots be picked up as odd movement and be detectable on a server though? Kind of similar to how those “not a robot” checks can tell if a human is clicking on the box just by looking at the movements of the cursor.

    In addition, things like textures and game-modifications could be picked up in part by things like checksum verification to make sure the client is unmodified (assuming the files are modified on the disk and not in memory)

    I feel like most client-side changes like see-through walls or player highlighting make themselves pretty obvious when aggregated over multiple games. A good user-reporting system could probably catch most of these.

    I definitely agree though, allowing multiple random companies to install ring 0 rootkits should not be the norm. Honestly, even a Windows-level anticheat would be problematic because it would only worsen the monopoly Microsoft has on competitive games as a platform. A new solution would need to be cross-platform or else it would only be marginally better than what already exists.




  • Preface: I’m not an expert in this yet but I’m pretty interested in learning about systems-level topics so if I’m wrong please correct me!

    Yes, the thing about anticheats and anti viruses is that they are only useful when they have access to the underlying resources that a virus or cheat engine might try to modify. In other words, if cheating software is going to use kernel-level access to modify the game, then an anticheat would also need kernel-level access to find that software. It very quickly became an arms race to the lowest level of your computer. It’s the same with anti viruses.

    IMO the better strategy would be to do verification on a server level, but that probably wouldn’t be able to catch a lot of cheats like wall hacks or player outlines. At some point you just have to accept that some cheaters are going to get through and you’ll have to rely on a user-reporting system to get cheaters because there will always be a way to get past the anticheats and installing a separate rootkit for each game isn’t exactly a great idea.


  • It’s a setting you can change in your lemmy profile, and having the bot setting turned on doesn’t stop you from posting manually.

    I’m not sure if it goes the other way around though so bad-faith bot posts pretending to be real people could probably still happen if the bot setting is never enabled.

    Edit: just to be clear Blaze is definitely not a bot but I don’t think bots necessarily have to have the bot icon.


  • I’m also Gen Z and this was me for a while as well. Something that really helped me is not focusing as much on all of the million things going wrong that are way out of my control, and taking smaller steps wherever I can to try to make things better. That shift in perspective has made a lot of things more manageable and less overwhelming even if I still ultimately have the same negative outlook on everything that’s going on right now.